In the November 9th meeting of the Calgary City Council a report from the Calgary Planning Commission was presented on the subject of pawn shops and pay day loans in the Calgary area.

Of particular concern to the commission was the tendency for these businesses to coalesce

It reported that there were 82 payday lending businesses in Calgary and 15 pawn shops. Payday loan operations are usually very short-term loans that can be repaid by means of a pre-authorised debit on a chequing account or post-dated cheque, that is required concurrently with the loan. Under Alberta regulations payday loan operators are prohibited from implementing rollover loans, therefore each loan must be repaid in full. However, individuals can take out concurrent loans with one payday loan business.

One particular payday loan outfit in Calgary has been seen advertising a 14 day loan for $300 with a fee of $69 giving a total repayment of $369 over the two weeks. In annualised terms this works out to result in a percentage rate changes of 599.63 per cent. This seems to be at odds with the maximum rate of 60 per cent which is the allowable rate in Canada.

Council was concerned that payday loan businesses clustering in particular areas of the city would have negative impacts on the city, including aesthetic impacts.

The main result of this was a defined 400 metre separation distance for payday loan operators. This comes with a maximum 10 percent variance of the distance given at the discretion of council.

Clustering of these short term loan institutions was found in areas such as Centre Street North, Macleod Trail, 36 Street NE and 17 Avenue SE. If clustering is left unabated it can escalate to the point where other businesses are crowded out and the payday loan segment becomes too large resulting in a suboptimal mix of businesses in an area.

The concentration of businesses in these areas can reach up to 10 times the average density for the city.

It remains to be seen what impact this new regulations will have on the payday loan industry of Calgary.

(March 13, 2015) – Remember two years ago, when the Republican-controlled Washington State Senate brought our state to the brink of a government shutdown?

The Senate had a list of ideological policy bills upon which they demanded House action before they would agree to an operating budget. After two overtime sessions, cooler heads finally prevailed and Gov. Jay Inslee signed a deal just hours before the budget cycle ended on July 1, prompting The (Everett) Herald to editorialize, “Ideology and partisanship, especially in the Senate, supplanted pragmatism.”

Good times… good times.

One of those 2013 ideological policy bills is back in 2015, and the more solidly Republican-controlled Senate just sent it to the House. It’s SB 5899, which would relax consumer protections against short-term high-interest payday loans that push low-income working families deeper and deeper into debt. The bill would replace the state’s limited payday loans with “installment loans” that would allow up to a year’s worth of interest and fees.

Washington’s current law limits payday loans to $700 per loan and no more than eight loans per year. Borrowers are charged a $95 fee and typically must pay it off in two weeks. Under SB 5899, a $700 loan would cost borrowers up to a total of $1,195 in principal, interest and fees if paid off in six months, and up to a total of $1,579 if it took a full year.

Organized labor and other advocates for low-income working families have joined anti-poverty and consumer groups in opposing SB 5899. Why? Because payday loans don’t solve a financial crisis, they create one. Borrowers often must take a second loan to pay off the first, and so on, leading to a spiral of debt that sucks them dry.

It also harms the economy.

A 2013 study by the Insight Center for Community Economic Development found that the national burden of repaying payday loans in 2011 led to $774 million in lost consumer spending, the loss of more than 14,000 jobs, and an increase in Chapter 13 bankruptcies. The study found that each dollar of interest paid to payday lenders subtracted $1.94 from the economy due to reduced household spending, while only adding $1.70 to payday lending establishments. It’s an anti-multiplier effect. For every dollar of interest paid in payday loan interest, the economy lost a quarter.

The 2015 legislative session was supposed to focus on last fall’s big campaign issues: funding basic education and transportation, addressing income inequality, and making sure our tax dollars (and tax incentives) are efficiently spent. How did promoting payday lending get in there again?

It began last fall, all right. But it didn’t come from the public, it came from Seattle-based payday lender MoneyTree.

Jim Brunner of The Seattle Times wrote an explosive story last week outing Moneytree as leading the full-court lobbying press to relax payday lending laws. He reports that the effort began last fall when the company and its executives, who traditionally direct their political contributions to Republicans, “sought to strengthen ties with Democrats, boosting donations to Democratic legislator campaigns in last fall’s elections, and quietly employing a well-connected Seattle public-affairs firm that includes the political fundraiser for Gov. Jay Inslee and other top Democrats.”

On Tuesday, a heroic effort was made by most of the Senate’s Democratic minority caucus to stop SB 5899 or amend it to lower the interest and fees payday lenders can charge. But those efforts were thwarted, and after a passionate debate that lasted more than two hours, the bill passed the Senate, 30-18, with Democratic Sens. Brian Hatfield, Steve Hobbs, Karen Keiser, Marko Liias, and Kevin Ranker joining all Republicans (except Sen. Kirk Pearson) in voting “yes.”

Now it heads over to the House, where its companion bill died without a floor vote after Wednesday’s cutoff deadline. The question is, given Moneytree’s… outreach… to Democrats, will it again die in their House? Will it again become embroiled in end-game budget negotiations to try to force its passage?

We hope not.

We agree with state Attorney General Bob Ferguson, who sent a letter to legislators opposing the bill, saying our state’s payday-lending system includes important safeguards for consumers “and does not need to be overhauled.”

We also agree with The (Tacoma) News Tribune, which wrote that payday lenders’ efforts to pass SB 5899 “have nothing to do with helping poor people and everything to do with their bottom line. Lawmakers should see this legislation for what it is and reject it. If it passes, Gov. Jay Inslee should veto it.”

The Stand is the news service of the Washington State Labor Council, AFL-CIO.

Dryden 37 Senior Loan Fund (the issuer) and Dryden 37 Senior Loan Fund LLC (the co-issuer) represent an arbitrage cash flow collateralized loan obligation (CLO) that will be managed by Prudential Investment Management, Inc. (Prudential). Net proceeds from the issuance of notes will be used to purchase a portfolio of approximately $500 million of leveraged loans. The CLO will have a four-year reinvestment period.

KEY RATING DRIVERS

Sufficient Credit Enhancement: Credit enhancement (CE) of 36% for class A, in addition to excess spread, is sufficient to protect against portfolio default and recovery rate projections in the ‘AAAsf’ stress scenario. The level of CE for the class A notes is below the average for recent CLO issuances; however, cash flow modeling indicates performance in line with other ‘AAAsf’ rated CLO notes.

‘B+/B’ Asset Quality: The average credit quality of the indicative portfolio is ‘B+/B’, which is slightly better than that of recent CLOs. Issuers rated in the ‘B’ rating category denote relatively weak credit quality; however, in Fitch’s opinion, the class A notes are unlikely to be affected by the foreseeable level of defaults. The class A notes are robust against default rates of up to 57.4%.

Strong Recovery Expectations: The indicative portfolio consists of 96.4% first-lien senior-secured loans. Approximately 89.5% of the indicative portfolio has either strong recovery prospects or a Fitch-assigned Recovery Rating of ‘RR2’ or higher, resulting in a base case recovery assumption of 76.1%. In determination of the class A note rating, Fitch stressed the indicative portfolio by assuming a higher portfolio concentration of assets with lower recovery prospects and further reduced recovery assumptions for higher rating stress assumptions. The analysis of Dryden 37 class A notes assumed a 34.7% recovery rate in Fitch’s ‘AAAsf’ scenario.

RATING SENSITIVITIES

Fitch evaluated the structure’s sensitivity to the potential variability of key model assumptions including decreases in weighted average spread or recovery rates and increases in default rates or correlation. Fitch expects the class A notes to remain investment grade even under the most extreme sensitivity scenarios. Results under these sensitivity scenarios ranged between ‘A-sf’ and ‘AAAsf’ for the class A notes.

Sources of information used to assess these ratings were provided by the arranger, J.P. Morgan Securities LLC, and the public domain.

Key Rating Drivers and Rating Sensitivities are further described in the accompanying new issue report, which will be available shortly to investors on Fitch’s website at ‘www.fitchratings.com‘.

For more information about Fitch’s comprehensive subscription service FitchResearch, which includes all presale reports, surveillance and credit reports on more than 20 asset classes, contact product sales at +1-212-908-0800 or at ‘webmaster@fitchratings.com‘.

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